Piracy
is one of those subjects that raise strong arguments on both sides of
the issue. The major film and music studios along with major software
companies claim they lose
millions to piracy each year. At the same time, the legal
campaigns and lawsuits
brought against the internet users accused of piracy often cast
much too wide a net and rake in innocent users who are harassed for
things they didn’t do.

The saga surrounding the largest
pirate network in the world called The Pirate Bay has raged for
years. The site has been in legal hot water on multiple occasions and
is still up and operating. The latest happening in the saga is that
the bandwidth its provider has been forced
to stop providing access to the internet for The Pirate
Bay's servers.

The shutdown occurred after several major movie
studios obtained the injunction from a German court. The injunction
forced CB3ROB Ltd. & Co to stop providing access to The Pirate
Bay. Administrators of TPB have backup plans in the works already
reports TorrentFreak and
are working on rerouting their servers, which were unaffected by the
injunction, to a new provider. The Pirate Bay will reportedly be down
for several hours while the site is routed via an IP-tunnel to a new
provider.

With movie studios unable to shut The Pirate
Bay down directly, some studios have taken to going after those who
download from the site and other torrent sites directly. Anyone who
downloaded the film The
Hurt Locker
illegally has a chance
of being sued by the producers of the movie.

"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that." -- Microsoft COO Kevin Turner